29 October

Sir Walter Raleigh’s sharp medicine

1618 No Renaissance man was more dazzling in his accomplishments than Sir Walter Raleigh (the name, incidentally, is spelled 70 different ways in documents of the time). Aged fifteen he was already a military hero, fighting for the French Huguenots. In his early thirties he was a renowned explorer of the New World. Now Sir Walter, when the Spanish Armada sailed, as commander of the Ark Royal he led the successful maritime defence of his country in 1588 and was rewarded with a huge slice of Irish real estate. Legends accumulated around him (most famously, and apocryphally, that of him throwing down his velvet cloak to spare the footwear of his monarch, Elizabeth I, from a spot or two of mud).

Less salubrious anecdotes also attached themselves to him, as that recorded by Aubrey in his Brief Lives:

He [Sir Walter Raleigh] loved a wench well; and one time getting one of the Maids of Honour up against a tree in a wood (’twas his first lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her honour, and modest, she cried, ‘Sweet Sir Walter, what do you me ask? Will you undo me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!’

At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried in the ecstasy, ‘Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter!’ She proved with child, and I doubt not but this hero took care of them both, as also that the product was more than an ordinary mortal.

On the death of Elizabeth and with the accession of James I, Raleigh was accused of rebellion and sentenced to be executed as a traitor. It was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower, during which period (some twelve years) he wrote his History of the World, and some distinguished poetry. He was released in 1616, to undertake a voyage to discover the fabled Eldorado in South America. He failed, unsurprisingly, and on his return to England, under Spanish pressure (the country was indignant at his bloody incursion into their colonial territory) the death sentence was re-invoked. He was executed on 29 October 1618. As a courtesy, the former punishment of disembowelling was commuted. As a further courtesy, he was allowed to feel the axe that would remove his head. He commented, wryly: ‘This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries.’ The removed head was embalmed and preserved by his wife for the 29 years of life that remained to her. It never, supposedly, left her presence.